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An anonymous reader writes "One of the major unanswered questions about Bill C-30, Canada's lawful access/online surveillance bill, is who will pay for the costs associated with responding to law enforcement demands for subscriber
information ('look ups') and installation of surveillance equipment ('hook ups'). Michael Geist recently obtained documents (PDF) from Public Safety under the Access to Information Act that indicates the government doesn't really have its own answer. But he reports that the police do — a new 'public safety' tax to be added to Internet and wireless bills."

Out government equals products and services offered at the barrel of a gun. They have a monopoly on it too, I can't think of very many monopolies where the price of service goes down and the quality goes up.

While true I hate the continual addition of different types of taxes. It is horribly in efficient. Lets say the bill passes. Rather than add some revenue from existing taxes to pay for it (or the opposite: remove some unnecessary tax credits) they dream up another tax that than has to be collected, another dozen people get jobs doing nothing but making sure people pay this particular 0.1% of the governments revenue etc. Same thing with arguments for gambling as an alternative revenue source, horribly in efficient but sadly hidden tax everywhere distracts people from the total amount of their money that does to government.

Exactly. Since this is Canada we're talking about here, we can talk about privatization (Canada has privatized things the US likely would never do, ironically). The same "who pays for it" thing happens when publicly-owned monopolies are privatized. Sure taxes can be reduced, but now we're paying for the service *and* profit. So in the end things end up costing a lot more all around.

And finally, this principle is why corporate income taxes make very little sense. Corporations who sell consumer goods, for

Yeah except the 99% feed themselves, went to school, had vacations, raised kids, fought wars, drove on roads, went to hospitals etc, and then yeah the 1% gets the rest. A big problem with this concept of "the 1%" is that the 1% changes year to year. Similarly the bottom 20% are about 1/2 new workers and students. They don't stay at the bottom 20% their whole life and it seems pretty obvious that the people that have no experience and are just starting out "at the bottom" will have "at the bottom" wages.

Statistically speaking, the problem is that the 40M CEO never worked for $1. Most (and we're not even near 50% here) of the rich were born that way. If mobility into the 1% were significant, people would be much less upset about it.

It is amazing though how people criticize the billionaires' for doing so well but it is very rare the ideas that found companies at the size that they have to make their billions. It isn't "unfair" unless they got an uncommon reward for a common skill.

Please. You see how shitty discussions people made with the real estate bust. Just because you have money doesn't mean you automatically don't make stupid mistakes with it. As well people that come up with the bs stories about how they came to country x with $100 and made their fortune for the vast majority of cases it is crap. Yeah they might have only had $100, then they worked their ass off, saved like crazy. Came up with an idea gambled on it with what they saved and it worked. So that $1 wouldn't just

Big companies are rarely based on big ideas. Instead, they are based on ruthlessly destroying competition. Take Google for example. Lots of people had their ideas, but Google had the funding to put down their competitors.

Yeah and people chose to use their browser, and they convinced advertisers to advertise with them. It is amazing with MS search yahoo etc until recently somehow Google is the bad guy. It is the rare case where a company exists without competition. MS might be the closest in the tech world and look how that is working out for them (though to be fair until the last 6 months or so they were hugely undervalued IMHO versus increased revenue. For the last 10 years MS has been written off as doomed but they piled

Adding taxes increases the price of a good. Increasing price causes a decrease of demand. In order to return to a profit-maximizing price, firms must then decrease the prices of goods (and reduce output*.) The firm's share of the tax is the amount they need to lower the price. The household's share of the tax is the cost of the tax, minus the price decrease.

Households never pay the entire amount of any sales tax, because demand always responds to price. Arguably, households don't even pay the entire amount

<quote>I'm sure this is a popular sentiment, but it simply isn't true for most products and services. Try learning economics from someplace *other* than your fellow Randroids before spouting off next time.</quote>

Exactly. If everything stayed the same and companies were free to just increase their prices the whole argument for higher gas taxes, CO2 taxes etc would fail because people would continue to buy those services. If they price the internet to the point where it becomes more expensive for me to have a connection to pirate my movies than I'll start buying DVDs, renting them, or spend more time trying to track down people that have it already. The government isn't trying to make the tax so large that it reduces

Canada has it bad because our liberals think they know how to better spend our money than us and so do our conservatives. There is always a program that is essential for security, helping immigrants, helping the french, helping the natives, etc etc, it never ends.

Riiight, because all those CEOs are gonna give up their coke and hooker bonuses so they don't have to stick it to the consumer...oh wait, that's not what they do, they simply jack up the price! I hate to break the news to ya sparky but even in areas where there is supposedly competition we have seen what happens is companies simply collude to raise prices together. Every time the government tries to stick it to a corp thanks to globalism if they don't raise prices they simply move but there is no way in hell they are gonna just eat the cost as that would cut into profits and with Wall Street being Vegas with nicer clothes if you do that then your stock takes a nosedive.

Whether you like it or not any gouging of the corps just ends up being dumped on the back of the poor consumer. Hell in my own area the working poor simply can't even have Internet as the cableco and teleco have been matching each others price raises one for one so now the cheapest usable Internet (I don't consider a WISP that offers 512Kb down with towers that go down for days at a time really usable and even that is $60 a month and a $125 hookup fee) is $75 a month and that is if you can even get it as even though its a college town and the city has grown by over a third neither the cableco nor the teleco have moved a single inch as far as coverage in over a decade.

This is why we need to nationalize the lines and open them up to REAL competition as what we have here in the states now is a bad joke unless you live in one of the megacities. We already paid 200 billion [pbs.org] to have the nation wired for high speed and all we got in return is a Goatse from the corps so we should demand they pay the money back with interest in 90 days or we take the lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll give them a decade on every house they run FTTH, 25 if those homes previously had no service. Because the whole "greed is good" mantra that has infected this country like a cancer has killed any chance of getting anything vital like nationwide broadband done by private corps, hell they don't even upgrade their own systems and instead simply slap caps and other crap on instead of increasing capacity.

What we seem to be glossing over is how outnumbered we are in the world. India and China each have populations that crush ours like a bug. They are catching up to us at such a crazy fast pace. China will soon be the number one consumer on the planet as they raise their standards of living up. They will demand a lion's share of the resources.

We aren't competing. We don't even know how to compete. We have let our politicians become such whores that they have sold out to people that want our ec

If we have another "war" or "military action" we need to demand the draft. Perhaps when the 1%'s and the politicians children are being maimed and killed, they might pause before committing us to more warmongering.

Not likely. More likely, the kids of the 1% will just go to school in Europe and stay there at the European subsidary's office until they pass draft age. Back in the day, during Vietnam, the only 1% kids we saw in uniform were officers. The 'enlisteds' were all middle class & lower class ki

I truly believe that even though I am atheist that there are a handful of companies that are truly evil. That they are run by those that take sick delight in causing real suffering and misery upon their fellow human beings, your Goldman Sachs, your Halliburton, your Monsanto, companies that if they could increase their profits 15% by throwing live babies in a meat grinder they would. I don't see how anyone can not believe in real evil when seeing these pigs living like kings off of the misery and suffering they have caused with zero remorse. Hell if I walked into any of those companies and saw actual demons in three piece suits going to meetings like Wolfram & hart frankly I wouldn't even be surprised, these companies do nothing but profit from suffering.

But you seem to forget we had the draft for ages and the rich simply either went to college or some reserve unit in some cushy location like Dubya in Alabama. The 1% may cause the misery but they aren't about to let their delicate selves get dirty like the peasants. look how many chickenhawks are pushing for a war with Iran, notice how none of their kids are in harm's way?

Sadly it WILL change, but only after you see the rich fleeing the country like the fall of Saigon after the whole thing falls apart. Even an 8th grader with 2 economics classes can see the situation is simply unsustainable, you have nearly half a billion people and all the factories were sent overseas. As Huckabee pointed out even our military can't function anymore without CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) and we make less tech now than we did in 1975! if you have a strong stomach you might want to look at these numbers [businessinsider.com] and realize that they are over 2 years old and the downward trends they are listing have accelerated since that time. How anyone can believe that there is any other path in our future but an Arab Spring is beyond me, because the poor simply aren't gonna go crawl off into a corner and slowly starve like they did in the depression. Things are gonna get ugly, I believe after the student loan bubble bursts followed by the stock market bubble you'll see US money become practically worthless and at that time their little red VS blue distractions simply won't placate the masses anymore. If the conspiracy theorists are right they are building "FEMA camps" for just this eventuality, some nice out of the way concentration camps to put the teeming masses. But nobody is gonna put up with camps thanks to the Germans so when that happens will be when the shooting starts.

We are on our own too. Just think about it. We are the ones that ride to the rescue of people from evil stuff like this. Who's going to rescue us? Nobody, that's for sure.

I'm too old and out of shape for this shit. But my younger self would have loved it, and kicked the Revolutionary War 2.0 off already. (at least in my addled memory/imagination, it's fun to talk shit when your old) But yeah, it's coming. You can smell it in the wind almost, like before a big rumble, the calm before the storm.

Enjoy the calm, everyday little things, because if we snap and go postal on this system, the world as we know it will change, and not for the best or a long time. I think we should embrace the violence of the vote before we go to the sword. We need to redeem the system on it's merits, or else we need to throw it as well on the failed ash heap of history's failed governments. The damn thing will work because we all made it work, or not.

I'm afraid you are right though. Here's how I see it playing out as well. This coming election is a lightning rod for crazy amounts of trouble. I've never seen this country so divided. in my life and I was born in the mid 60s. I have seen some shit, but nothing like this. Neither side will be happy with the results. I am afraid that voter fraud will be rampant, then discovered, then outrage will spiral out of control fast. There is so much anger and hate, we have fed it with hate filled radio and "news". You have to go back to Nazi Germany or the Soviets to find the intensity of hateful propaganda going on. It's a simmering pot, about to boil over.

Another thing to take careful note of is women's rights. Women's civil rights are under attack in ways I couldn't believe. It's like we now have a Christian Taliban, hell bent on dragging us back to the dark ages. I know this sounds crazy, but darkness is falling on us. The shadows are growing long.

The darkest day we have had was when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, and their bribing was free speech. I say behold, something evil was born of this country on that day. Until we take that ground back from them, we have fallen.

As far as faith is concerned, seeing is believing. I'm afraid you might become a believer, sadly not because of the light you seen radiating from a real Christian in your life, but instead from seeing the faces of evil and recognizing the shocking reality of it all. Not today of course, but in that fearsome future that we both strive to avoid. May we both be barking lunatics and wrong, wrong wrong.

Because there are many that believe you can't have evil as tangible thing without a devil behind it, but I think they are wrong. i think you can pour enough hatred into a thing, be it land or an institution you literally "sour the ground" and create something truly dark and sinister.

I truly believe a thing can be evil, it can be soured. it is no God nor devil, but the combined malice and viciousness of humans that creates it, feeds it, makes it grow like a cancer. I believe some of those corps i have n

Unfortunately you are incorrect. Without an objective standard of "good" any claim of "good" or "evil" is nothing more than ones personal opinion. Under Atheism, if god does not exist, to say that killing the mentally retarded is "evil" is nothing more than ones own personal opinion. Someone else could hold the opinion that the burden they place on society is too great and is hurting the rest of society.

Let me explain it this way: How do you objectively tell if a drawing of President Obama is a "Good" dr

Actually I'd say you are misinformed, or at least misguided. you say that atheist can tell "good" from "evil" yet yet we are supposed to not act on this...why exactly? Because there is no sky bully to beat us, to spank our asses like naughty children? How about because we wouldn't like it if the same thing were done to OUR families, isn't that a good enough reason? Just because i don't believe in the sky bully doesn't magically mean life is without consequence ya know, one can choose not to destroy not beca

You entire premise makes no sense, why does one need to JUTIFY as you put it anything? if you want justification how about for the harm it does to society which i already pointed out? Or how about treating others with decency and respect will often get YOU treated with decency and respect in return? How about common fucking sense? Do they not exist in your world? Apparently not, since you just seem to be incapable of even picturing a world where we don't need sky bullies to live decent lives. BTW have you s

That doesn't work the way you would think. Here in the US, our president is responsible for killing 200 Mexican civilians, arming Mexican drug lords, killing US citizens without trial or even arrainment, signing ACTA, embezzeling around $50 Billion given directly to campaign donors, trying to destroy one of the only industries that is actually creating jobs (oil), signed into law that you could eventually end up in jail for not buying what the government wants you to, hiding dangers of Chevy Volts randomly

You could just be an anonymous troll, but I get a feeling you actually believe your own line of bull. If so, you probably never read any of the "liberal" blogs. Liberals do NOT like Obama. Liberals do not trust Obama. Liberals wish they had a candidate who kept his word and was actually a little liberal himself.

Obama is a right-wing sell-out. He said all of the right things when he was running for the nomination and once elected, he sold out at the first opportunity.

Yes, it's all kinds of wrong, but what are the options? Republicans? Seriously? They have lost their minds. I used to be one. I didn't vote this last time for President because I was Republican and I couldn't vote for the shitbags they put up. The Bush Republicans all needed FIRED. It wasn't about voting for someone, it was about firing Republicans. How else do you think that a black man, with a name like Barrack Obama could get elected President? Holy shit, we would have elected a cartoon character over a Republican after Bush.

Then it's like we collectively woke up from a drinking bender and said "we elected who??" In the wake of this, the Republicans have been trying to gain traction and with the help of Rightwing media outlets like Fox News, drop the blame from Bush's atrocities onto this President. It's one giant case of denial as they try to gloss over the fact that this party produced one of the worse Presidents in human history.

Is Obama shitty? Yes. Do we have better options? No. We have even worse options, ones that will give you nightmares.

We are a fragmented people with our heads up our collective ass. If we ever take politics as seriously as we do sports or fashion then we might have a chance of making the correct choices for our democracy. But that isn't going to happen, we are fucking retarded collectively and will continue to be fed shit sandwiches by the powers that be until we snap and burn it all to the ground.

The police are an economical scam. With normal goods and services, supply and demand dictates spending. Well we here in Canada are experiencing the lowest crime rates since forever. Police know this and steadfastly refuse or make it nigh impossible to report or prosecute thieves and burglars (think break-ins) to skew crime statistics as best as possible It happened to me, a neighbour, and a grandmother. All separate incidents.
So when have we EVER seen any significant cut to police services when demand (crime is at an all-time low)? Never. Frankly, what the police fail to realize is, if everything really went to plan, their reward for doing a excellent/perfect job would be a pink slip.
Instead, we have them entrenching. And asking for more monies in new and trend setting ways. They have a budget. Now they want an ISP tax. Smells like MPAA and RIAA. This whole thing stinks.
[sorry for ranting].

government spending is nuts, especially in bc. now they want more money, and want to screw those that deserve a bit more. my wage has steadily declined since 1992 to the point where i can't even afford cable and internet, let alone desire it. hell, gas is getting harder to buy.

government entities are the first to give themselves a fat raise on a whim. icbc, translink, bc ferries, the mlas themselves. all got huge or multiple raises in recent years. and our taxes go up.

now the cops, who do jack shit but hand out road tax speeding tickets, want a tax on the internet?

I couldnt agree more. Why the hell would we have to bear more taxes so the govt can fucking SPY ON US. I AM NOT A CRIMINAL AND I DO NOT want to pay MORE TAXES just so the govt can SPY on us. This bill stinks of 1984 and totalitarianism, and I want it dead!

Also please go make yourselves useful RCMP and bust some more speeders, cellphone talking drivers and stoners, since those are theworst crimes you seem capable of stopping. Actually dont bother, lets slash the RCMPs budget and put the money towards heathca

Government spending as a total is actually to low. It is how you keep people unemployed in a fiat economy (in a non-fiat economy you keep people unemployed by simply being rich and withholding the currency), so that corporations can buy slaves cheaper.

That the government debt at the same time is high and rising is because the government is funneling money via both corrupt spending (as you mention) as well as a corrupt tax system that since the 1980s has been setup to allow the rich to slowly but surely drain money from the economy, hence forcing the government to inject more. (although as mentioned above, they deliberately inject less money than is needed to keep full employment rates)

It is the simple goal of supply side economy and always has been. Unemployment for the poor and government paying rent to the rich, all in one nice package.

And best of all. The left will defend the corrupt spending, while the right will defend the corrupt tax laws. It is the perfect fraud.

That's like saying "Just because there is no war on doesn't mean we should pull the soldiers back from the most recent battlefield. If they leave, surely the fighting will resume again!" It's flawed logic.

The real problem facing everyone in North America right now is that there are TOO MANY LAWS. Eventually, the 'lawmakers' and 'amenders' of law will need to stop. Otherwise, it is an eternal cycle of creating more laws without ever losing them. How long do you think it will take until breathing in a certain area is illegal? Until every single thing we do is so regulated, that a step 6" too far to the right will land us a ticket or in jail?

What we need is lawDESTROYERS, not lawmakers. The legal system in the US and Canada is completely overrun with trivial nonsense laws, and the current round of lawmakers is busy trying to find something to do. Instead of going back to reform clearly bogus laws which their constituents hate, they're trying to find the next hot topic for their fellow party campaigners.

I wish they had built a big RESET button into the US Government. I would be pushing the SHIT out of it right now.

I wish they had built a big RESET button into the US Government. I would be pushing the SHIT out of it right now.

There is one. It's called a convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution [wikipedia.org]. If two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures call for a constitutional convention, then Congress is obligated to arrange for a national convention during which any arbitrary amendments to the constitution can be proposed (the legality of the "arbitrary" part is not entirely clear due to the lack of precedence). They do not go into effect unless ratified by 3/4th of the states, though. See also: Second Constitutio [wikipedia.org]

The only important part of the argument is "to think of the children" then we can pass what ever is important (to the government, police, RIAA, etc). Don't let the common good or freedom get in the way.

Oh, I love that Nineteen Eighty-Four speak where "public safety'" actually means Internet spying and censorship! What is even more galling is that this comes not from a country like China or Burma but from a country like Canada!.

the national anthem. Anyone have suggestions for alternative lyrics? Maybe:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.Access to Information Act
A tax to spy on me
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

All public services are ultimately paid for with our tax dollars. We already pay for the electricity that powers the electric chair, the money that runs the prisons and the food our Prime Minister eats. If people understood that, maybe they'd get more involved in politics.

...into an anti-Tory bitchfest. It's insulting to those tho actually ARE oppressed in places from China and Cuba to Sudan and Syria and all in between. C-30 erodes our privacy rights but to say we are on the path to self destrucion at the hands of an insane tyrant is a really big stretch.

Also to clarify, for those who started foaming a the mouth when they saw "C-30" and stopped reading the rest of the article, this "internet security tax" has not been proposed by anyone in government nor by those in the t

If they want to spy on me I don't care. However if they want to spy on me I shouldn't be paying for them to do it. What they could do is take part of my internet bill which I'm sure is padded with more then 100% profile and use that for there spying purpose. The other thing I'm wondering about is if they will do this via hardware or software, doing it via software would open up a new entire department of issues. I'm sure as hell not about to buy a hardware device so they can spy on me, if they want t

You may NOT monitor my data, voice, and video traffic without a search warrant.

You may request my contact information from my ISP without a warrant, the same as you can do a reverse phone book lookup. It will cost virtually nothing except staff time to do the reverse-name lookup, because my ISP already has a database with that information. But DAMNED if I'm going to tolerate an abuse of my Charter rights:

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

A lot of them are non-profit Society's with barely enough margins to pay their operating costs. We're talking volunteer boards here. This is particularly true in rural areas where there's no business case to justify big ISPs putting in infrastructure.
Another thing - C-30 defines a telecommunication service provider as *everyone* including individuals who are not principally using it for their own household use. Who's going to reimburse Joe Average for their costs to comply with this legislation if they

Liberals. We're not using words correctly any more. We're in a world where so-called "liberals" want to preserve the existing power structure all over the world, to the point of idolizing murderous, oppressive dictators and bullies. [google.com]

I'm not sure that "liberal" is the right word. In my mind, a liberal is someone who craves liberty, which today's crop of tell-you-what-to-do liberals most certainly do not.